In the present business environment, corporations are demanding more real time information to make sound and time-critical business decisions. Business Intelligence (BI) applications have been used and applied to business data, such as sales revenue, costs, income, or other financial data to facilitate such business enterprise decision-making. BI applications provide various historical, current and predictive future views of business operations. One common function of BI applications is report generation. A report is typically a document containing information that is automatically retrieved from a data source (e.g., data warehouse) and formatted according to a predefined schema. Reports may be used to support the decision making process in many areas, such as sales, marketing, management, budgeting or forecasting.
In a large organization, however, many reports are generated every day and scattered across many departments in the organization. The volume of information contained in these reports is so high that the time necessary to properly deal with it is often unacceptable. In order for the reports to become actually usable knowledge, they need to be organized and easily accessible.
Conventional techniques developed for organizing reports do not provide a meaningful and organized view of the reports. Users are unable to easily visualize the relations between different isolated reports and navigate from report to report. In addition, conventional techniques provide very little intelligence in discovering or extracting relations between the reports. Such techniques also provide very limited customization capabilities to the user.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide an improved technology for organizing data.